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unthinkingly edited this page Sep 13, 2010 · 10 revisions

Swift builds on Twitter Vote Report, a platform for crowd-sourced election monitoring. Twitter Vote Report made it possible for US voters to report voting irregularities in real-time using a standard set of tags for monitoring wait time at polling places.

Swift hopes to expand this approach into a general purpose toolkit for crowdsouring the semantic structuring of data so that it can be reused in other applications and visualizations. The developers of Swift are particularly interested in crisis reporting (Ushahidi) and international media criticism (Meedan), but by providing a general purpose crowdsourcing tool we hope to create a tool reusable in many contexts.

Swift engages self-interested teams of “citizen editors” who curate publicly available information about a crisis or any event or region as it happens.

Other super-relevant links you probably should visit:

Overview of Swift:

  • Community: See the lists above and the github network: http://github.com/ajturner/swiftriver/network
  • Documentation: My god it’s full of words! Hosted on Github with the source code: http://github.com/ajturner/swiftriver/wikis
  • Vote Report application code: This is the core of existing app. Swift is a fork of Vote Report, currently with very minor additions. We’re hacking it into something even better, and foraging a lot of other great FOSS software along the way.
  • Carrot third party code: A clustering engine and UI. So you can put in data and get back thematic categories. Useful for lots of unstructured data. see: http://demo.carrot-search.com/carrot2-webapp/search?in=Web&q=indian+e…
  • Solr/Lucene third party code: Handle the search backend.
  • Freebase, Geocommons, Wikipedia and OpenStreetMap APIs will serve as our structured repository of data whenever possible using the glue in the taxonomy editor project.
  • Github Source Code Managment: we are doing all of our work through Github. You can do an initial checkout by installing git and running: git clone git://github.com/ajturner/swiftriver.git

Technical Concepts and Scope

A small but complete statement of what the Swift project intends to do:

  • Users can create Instances, such as “Ushahidi: Swine Flu Tracking” or “Meedan MENA News” which are RSS aggregators
  • Instances bundle RSS feeds from numerous sources, such as http://nytimes.com.
  • When users create an instance they become administrators for that instance, and can add or delete sources.
  • An instance is then available for sweepers to join and being tagging links as they emerge from the sources.
  • The tags used can be arbitrary or can be part of a more complex taxonomy of tags, which is editable by the administrators of an instance.
  • The veracity of links is computed.
  • The resulting set of scored and annotated links is available via API

The Swift Stack:

  • Strong reliance on the existing link-sharing and taggable ecosystem: Twitter, Flickr, Delicious and YouTube integration.
  • Totally open source: Rails, MySQL, Lucene/SOLR.
  • RESTful API
  • Complete Test Suite
  • Strong Semantic Web integration
  • Git-based verion control
  • Amazon EC2 LAMP hosting

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INSTALL

http://wiki.github.com/ajturner/swiftriver/installation

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LICENSE
Made available under the MIT License.

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